


all down my veins, my heartstrings call

by ennaih (aquandrian)



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Jynnic Fandom Challenge, Prompt Fill, also there might be some use of a Mendo character, battle violence, cos Krennic likes knives, cos it just made sense, mercenary au, rapturous romanticism, some torture and gore, which then turned into a
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-17
Updated: 2016-10-17
Packaged: 2018-08-22 01:22:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8267516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aquandrian/pseuds/ennaih
Summary: Orson Krennic meets his soulmate at the worst possible moment. Everything changes.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Are You The One That I've Been Waiting For?_ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Also I worked a line from the song into the final scene because I love it so much it almost was the title.

They told him his eyes were blue. That the sky was blue too. He accepted this but it meant very little to him. His mother taught him to categorise colours as so many subtle tones of grey, an infinite variety that frustrated him into silence and inertia as a child. Maybe that became a rage he tamed and carried with him into adulthood, a simmering violence at a world that denied a richness of language to him, language he couldn’t access and couldn’t share with other people, people he loved. His mother told him her hair was red and her eyes were the same blue as his. And he believed her, trained himself to see the nuance of difference, the different whiteness of her skin to the way his freckled and darkened in the sun. But knowing it was one thing. Trying to negotiate the colours of flowers, of pretty things to make or find for her was a whole other thing. 

So he drew for her. Charcoal and ink, using white space and fine dark lines to capture their small part of the galaxy for her. This was how he showed her his world, and knew he was loved for it. 

For a while, his father participated in this learning and categorising of the world, but the effort was too much and the disappointment too great. His father left for the politics and bureaucracy of the central planets, and in time found a new family and fathered boys who carved a confident way through the Academy and then the Senate.

Orson Krennic made his own way, painted his world in stark white and black. He schemed and manipulated, twisted people and projects to his own ends. He rose through the ranks of the Academy, sidestepped into the bureaucracy of the Galactic Republic, allied himself against the Separatists. And when the Empire made itself known, there he was in its midst, a cold-eyed creature who saw the world in very clear lines and shapes, saw his way through the galaxy cut out sharp in shades of what they told him was blood.

When the latest ragtag bunch of rebels launch their latest secret mission and are found and captured, they are brought before him. He delivers his cutting remarks, sweeps his cold gaze across them, dimly recognises a pilot and a droid, and is about to dismiss them when he realises. Their leader, a doe-eyed and painfully pretty girl, is staring at him with something more than the usual shock and awe. He flicks his gloved hand so one of the generals steps forward to inform the prisoners of their fate. It’s perfectly routine, nothing out of the ordinary since the project is undisturbed and the technology is entirely within their control. They’ll be killed, the Rebellion will gain another bunch of martyrs, and the Empire grinds on.

But he steps back, gloved hands folded at his belt, and watches the girl from under his brows. She isn’t listening to her terrible fate at all. Of course, she tries. She glances, alarmed, at the others, every emotion naked on her heart shaped face. All the guilt and fear and intelligent rage. 

Her gaze keeps dragging back to him. It’s irritating, over-familiar, the way she stares at his eyes and then his mouth, at the insignia he knows is blue and red and grey. She ought to be begging for her life, making outrageous threats, any manner of stupid heroic last stands. But she stares and stares, like he is some hideous alien from the furthest swamp planet, like she can’t help herself.

He dismisses them, fed up with this inexplicable anomaly. And then instructs a general to keep her separate. It’s an impulse, he’s well known for his caprice. He’s also known for an almost superhuman capacity for delayed gratification. So the rest of the rebel prisoners are killed or destroyed, and for weeks she remains in a cell, awaiting the Director’s whim.

Eventually, back on Coruscant, he remembers her and orders she be brought to his residential quarters. No one bats a lid but he knows the gossip runs rife. The Director’s sexual proclivities have long been a topic of speculation. Now here is an almost shockingly mundane development. Just one human girl, pretty enough.

“Jyn Erso.”

She glares at him, her silence a thing of pure hatred, pure fury. He finds himself disquieted again, has to conceal that reaction as he adjusts an immaculate cuff. She stands with her hands bound before her, in shabby dark clothes, a young thing with sufficient curves and unwashed hair. Vibrating with so much anger she isn’t the least fazed that she’s alone with the Director of the Imperial Army. His mouth curls as he moves closer to her, a delicious dark anticipation heating his blood, heating his imagination.

She lifts her chin as he approaches, keeps her eyes locked with his. She will not be intimidated. Not the slightest sign, not even a twitch in her throat. 

And then, as the Coruscanti sunshine moves across the white room, as it gleams the white grain of her skin, he realises.

Her eyes are a colour he’s never seen.

It makes him freeze in place, unnerved and disbelieving. Unable to grasp this impossible thing that’s happened.

He has no name for that colour. But somehow it speaks to him of danger, of dark beautiful things that could cut him apart and cut him into shreds, some creature beautiful and alien coming out from the dark heart of some jungle planet, ready to tear him to pieces. 

“What do you want?” she bites out, insolent. 

And he watches, appalled and fascinated, as her mouth gathers another colour he’s never seen. Deeper, richer, somehow lush and raw, a lethal softness.

“Jyn Erso,” he says, hearing the hoarse edge to his voice. “What colour do they say your eyes are?”

Her expression changes so swiftly he knows in an instant. It’s as true for her as it is for him. Somehow everything changes in that moment. He has this terrifying sense of the earth falling away from below his feet, like all his life up to this point has been a waiting in some featureless room. And everything he is at this moment is wrong, a costume he put on for the wrong reason at the wrong time.

She breathes fast and anxious, all her hatred vanished as those beautiful eyes search his face, seizing on his mouth, on his own eyes, on the shapes of his cheekbones. “Green,” she says shakily. “My father says I --”

She hears herself and the knowledge snaps back between them, who they are to each other. The poison floods her face again, tightens her mouth and flashes out of those eyes. 

He finds he doesn’t care anymore. Not about the people that come between them or the stupid chaos of the galaxy. It’s a dizzying sensation, like free falling. And when his hand lifts to touch her face, she recoils.

It’s a distant wounding. He can’t even remember the last time someone’s reaction hurt him.

“Don’t touch me,” she spits. “Don’t even come near me. You --” she chokes off and stumbles back, her eyes full of tears now. “You killed them _**all**_. All!”

“They were enemies of the Empire,” he says numbly.

“They were my friends! Good people! They --” she stops, hunches like the pain is physical, tearing inside her. “I loved them.”

She would never love him.

He turns his head to look at the wide transparisteel view of the city. His own throat is working, too much emotion and he can’t tell if it’s flung out from her or his own. It’s impossible and overwhelming. He can’t bring himself to say such pathetic things.

“I could keep you here.” He glances back at her, reaching for the coldness inside him and finding only a measure of it. She’s straightened up, sharp and wary. “You are after all entirely at my mercy.”

Jyn Erso’s focus narrows on him, her thoughts moving fast and intelligent, her face so expressive he can almost see them but not her strategy until she takes one smooth step forward and says softly: “You could.” 

Heat fills the air between them, quickens his blood. She looks up into his face, her mouth ripe, something so feline about the shape of her eyes, the sharp swoop of her lashes. “You could keep me here and do whatever you want to me.” All those images of violation and tenderness roar through his mind, of seeing her dark hair spilled across white sheets, learning the ways to make her scream and come, teaching her all the precise depraved ways to please him.

“And I will hate you every single second.”

This time he recoils, shocking himself. Completely unnerved, he turns away, ready to dismiss her, to erase this whole episode from the clean order of his life. But that’s impossible too. This cannot be denied, now it’s happened, now everything’s changed.

For several seconds, he stands away from her, breathing hard and thinking fast, sifting through all the possibilities. The Empire is a great vicious machine clicking and moving around him, threshing its way through the galaxy. 

“Very well.” He can’t look at her. His voice just that little bit shaken, he says: “You may leave. You may have your life, Jyn Erso.”

“Thank you,” she says with perfect dripping scorn. He closes his eyes as the droids escort her out. He’s going to be physically sick in a few moments. Everything he’s worked for and built over so many years, a few decades of his life now worthless and tainted.

The world is no longer black and white. It’s all muddling grey. And he can only remember green, the colour of loathing.

___________

 

He learns the colour of her lips was red. A particular deep shade that they say is almost burgundy. He draws her over and over again. When they come to tell him that she’s escaped, he is flicking up the little edges of her mouth, sharp and cruel against the lush curve of her lips. When they tell him the data tapes have gone missing, he is tracing the long delicate strands of her hair against her cheekbones, charcoal against vellum.

When the Death Star explodes, he is no longer Director of the Imperial Army. He is a recluse living in a small house just outside a village on an Outer Rim planet. The villagers are curious about him but he’s been aloof enough that they keep their distance. His eyes are still cold. They know him as a man in clean grey clothes with brutally short silver hair who says nothing unless absolutely necessary. He stays indoors, reads a lot. 

Once a couple of kids manage to break in while he’s getting provisions in town. He comes back to find only one small ornament has been stolen, a silver hair clasp that had belonged to his mother. The loss doesn’t hurt him as maybe it should have. But now he knows they know, that his house is a shrine of old datapads and books, records in all forms. 

It was probably that little Ithorian and her human friend, her curiosity overcoming all her manners. She’s probably horrified at herself. And sure enough, the next time he’s walking past the school, she’s staring aghast at him from the yard. He doesn’t acknowledge her. A few hours later, the silver clasp is on the front door step. He takes it inside, thoughtful. And the next day he takes a package to her parents who are justifiably suspicious until they unwrap it after he’s gone, and their little daughter lets out a squeal. It’s an Old Republic book of myths.

Her name is Vonnuvi. She studies with him after school, hours of reading through records. He tells her he’s researching the myths and beliefs of species across the galaxy but she’s a clever child. It doesn’t take her long to notice the pattern, and soon she’s only telling him about the different soulmate theories between cultures. 

“But why?” she asks him. “Why do we need soulmates?”

He laughs shortly. “I’ve wondered the same thing. We should be complete in ourselves, we should need nobody else.”

“Oh.” She pauses, frowning. “But my daddy would be in a horrible state if anything ever happened to my mummy.”

“It’s not good,” he mutters, almost to himself. “To be that dependent on another person for your happiness, it can’t be good. You’re of no use to anyone like that.”

“That’s not right,” Von says loudly and then remembers her manners. “No, Mummy says the nature priest says that it’s with love that we help each other the best. That we must love the galaxy to make it beautiful, to keep it safe. Only then are we truly ourselves.”

Orson Krennic, former destroyer of worlds, smiles sadly at the little Ithorian child. He doesn’t ask her what happens when you are forever denied that love, when you’ve cast yourself beyond redemption. She doesn’t need to know. And maybe, he hopes, maybe she’ll never discover that.

___________

 

Several months later, Von comes banging on his front door, hysterical with fear because her parents have been reported missing, captured on their way home through Hutt space. “Hush,” he tells her. “Go put some things together, you’ll stay with Lorc for a while. Stop crying, I need you to tell me exactly where they last were.”

He journeys inwards to the Mid Rim, trading certain Old Republic artifacts for enough credits to smooth his way without causing notice. The crowds and craft upset him, too long on his own in that little town, but Imperial training kicks in and his instincts for self-preservation are strong enough that he regains his confidence with every shady transaction and passage obtained.

Nar Shaddaa is as filthy as he remembers, and strangely exhilarating too because it’s so different to where he’s been. Even the sulphurous light in the lower levels of the city interests him, how it shades everything with a sort of poisonous grey, the streetwalkers in the corners sucking off creatures and humans alike, the mutterings of drug deals and the dull gleam of weapons on every suspicious criminal watching him go past. 

He finds the bar after getting lost three times, his temper leashed hard over the worry. It’s noisy and smoky, crowded with music and bodies, the reek of the great unwashed. He tries to breathe through his mouth, pushing his way to the counter hung with so many glass and durasteel shapes. A note passed to the Vong bartender who reads it with a grunt and jerks a scarred chin towards the far corner of the bar. 

“Thanks,” Krennic says with some sarcasm. His custom blaster is hidden under the leather jacket, a weird weight on his hip. Already he knows he’s likely to go for the knives instead, assuming the idiots he’s meeting don’t manage to punch him out first.

“Fraser,” the tallest one says. 

“That’s right,” he replies, taking the chair by the wall. Three unshaven human men, petty thieves trying to work out if it’s Corellian leather or Sullust, if he’s likely to have a significant amount of credits on him or back at lodgings.

“You got the money?” the one with the piercings asks.

He puts his empty hand palm down on the table between them. “You got the intel?”

The icy glare still works. And amazingly they don’t recognise him. Maybe it’s the clothes. It’s probably the stubble and the messy hair. No one’s ever seen the Director of the Imperial Army like this.

“Sure we do,” says the smallest filthiest one and tries to impale his hand to the table but Krennic already has him by the throat, snarling, “You stupid predictable fuck," and the fight is on. 

He has no right to enjoy it as much as he should. The thought burns in the back of his lightning fast mind, Von’s worried face and quivering mouths, as he breaks the men’s noses and smashes his elbow into this jaw and that. He’s knifed, a slash across his thigh that makes him roar and slam the heel of his hand right up into the man’s face, driving the nose back into the brain. It feels good to kill, it feels fucking glorious. The little skirmish turns into a brawl, half the bar joining in, the other half offering a running commentary.

Krennic focuses only on the three. The littlest one crumples dead to the floor. The one with the piercings breaks out some stupid whirling weapon that makes Krennic laugh, unhinged. He gets the weapon and pulverises the moron's face in, a mess of gore and steel. The brawl continues around him, shouts and lashing fists, the smash of boots and glitter of knives. The tallest one tries it the old-fashioned way, punches and kicks with the panic of a man way out of his depth. Krennic takes him down, gets his knee into the man’s throat, blade tip at one rolling terrified eye.

“Tell me.”

A chair flies past and crashes into the wall, splinters across the filthy floor. Someone falls against Krennic’s back and he pushes them away without looking, the knife unwavering. The brawl is subsiding now that the Vong bartender has picked up a heavily augmented blaster, nonchalantly aiming it at the ceiling.

The man makes a garbled sound, dark grey in the face now, a shade that’s supposed to be purple. He’s too scared to struggle. Krennic eases his weight. “I’m waiting.”

“Nar, Nar --” The man keeps trying to focus on the blade tip. “Nar --”

“I suggest you get off his throat. Then maybe he’ll talk.”

Krennic focuses on his breath. Careful. Don’t betray anything. That voice vibrates through every particle of him. He moves his knee back, keeping his eyes on the still grey panicked face. The man throws a pleading look to the side to where she stands just beyond Krennic’s periphery.

“Don’t look at her.” He nicks a line just under the lower lid. The man screams a little. “Look at me. Where are they?”

“Nar Kreeta.” The poor bastard’s crying now, tears and the trickle of blood. “Mining guild. Prisoners for, for --” He screams again when Krennic leans forward, the knife point pressing up under his eye.

“For the betting parlour,” she says. “I know what he’s talking about. You can let him go now.”

He considers it for a moment, then slits the man’s throat, swiftly back on his feet to avoid the blood spray. “Thanks,” he says curtly, and looks at her for the first time in over a year.

She’s still tiny and defiant, still painfully pretty, looking up at him with dark green eyes and her ripe red mouth, like she’s stepped off the pages of all his drawings, impossibly alive and untouchable.

“Orson Krennic,” she says, her voice low. 

Around them, the wounded are picking themselves up, grumbling over the dead. And the music starts again, too beautiful a melody for such chaos and squalor. Or maybe that’s just the music in his head because she’s not looking at him like she had before. Now her eyes are wide and searching on his face, like she’s looking at something she had forgotten was beautiful.

That’s absurd. His heart leaps, and he steps away, looking down as he stifles every urge, every stupid hope. “You said you know where this place is.” He needs something to wipe the blood off his knife. 

“Yes --”

His boot bumps the corpse of the little one. Reaching down, he wipes the blade on the shirt and then decides he may as well search the body. She watches him, silent, maybe judging. A few credits and a cheap timepiece are what he turns up.

“Why would you help me?” he asks, inspecting the craftsmanship of the timepiece.

“Didn’t say I would. I can just tell you where it is.” Her defiance makes him want to smile, stupidly happy inside.

“Fine.” He gets to his feet, forcing himself to meet her gaze. “Then tell me and we’re done.”

She blinks, something flickering across her expression. She’s learnt some control over that since they last met. Now he can’t read every single emotion, much less her thought. She glances at the counter. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink.”

He takes a step and his leg nearly buckles under him. Oh right, the knife wound. She doesn’t catch him, he catches himself on a table. She’s turned back to him, alert and looking him up and down. 

“Flesh wound?” she asks coolly.

“Yep. You said a drink?”

Jyn Erso grins. “Right.” 

He aches for her, somehow it seems right that he’s bleeding when they’ve met again, following her and bleeding because he can’t help it, because there’s nowhere else he’d rather be right now, not even for Von and her hapless parents.

She watches him as he takes a seat at the bar, teeth gritted against the pain that’s flooding him now that the adrenaline is receding. The material over his thigh is soaked dark, the grey he knows they call red. When that thought occurs to him, he glances at her and it’s maybe like she thinks it too, she knows it.

“What do you know about soulmates?”

He says it without thinking, all strategy and self-preservation hurled out the window. And maybe she’ll reject him again, doesn’t want to hear any of it. Or maybe, just maybe …

“Retsa. Two, please.”

The Vong bartender nods, moving away. Krennic knows he’s staring at Jyn’s profile, the perfect shape of her nose and mouth. Maybe every damned longing is naked on his face now, maybe he doesn’t fucking care. 

She feels him watching, thinks for a few moments, and then glances across at him. “What about soulmates?”

“I asked you. Did you grow up with stories about soul bonds? Soul marks? Anything?”

Troubled, she shakes her head. “No … did you?”

He scoffs, leaning his folded arms on the sticky counter. “My father didn’t believe in such nonsense. He said --” Krennic swallows, looking up at the glass shapes above them. “He said my handicap was my own. I was defective.” As she watches him, intent, he adds, “My mother said it made me special. But then she was like that.”

“Like what?” Jyn murmurs.

“Romantic. Dreamy. Creative. She said it meant I saw the world a different way and that I should make it beautiful.”

“It wasn’t though, was it?” Resentment now to her voice and in her tightening expression. “The world wasn’t beautiful.”

He gazes at her, registering the past tense, that that was then and this is now. “No … it wasn’t. Then.”

Her face trembles as they look at each other, and then she drops her gaze.

“Retsa.” The bartender sets their drinks down, impatient to be paid. Krennic forks out the credits, watches as Jyn reaches into her black jacket. Her body seems tighter, harder somehow, like the past year has been one of ruthless training. But her clothes are nondescript, not the slightest hint of allegiance one way or the other.

“How goes the Alliance?” he asks, his tone almost light.

She laughs, a short bright cynical sound that lances through him with pleasure. “How the fuck would I know?” 

He grins back. “Really? No hero welcome?”

Her mirth fades as they both remember. “No.” She curves her hand around her drink and takes a sip. “No. The Rebellion honours its martyrs.”

“I find that hard to believe,” he says carefully at his own drink. “That they wouldn’t appreciate your efforts.”

“It didn’t matter.” Her voice is heavy. “None of it mattered. I did what I had to do. They were already gone, so I finished the mission for them.”

A moment of silence between them as the history pools up and drains away. 

“And you.” She glances at the side of his face, her curiosity like a touch. “You left everything. Or were you banished? The stories are all different, you know. You’re not even supposed to be alive.”

“I wasn’t,” he replies instinctively. It does feel like truth as he sees her startlement. “I’m not sure I’ve been alive for all these years. Decades.”

For a moment, it seems like she wants to touch him, the way she leans so fractionally towards him, the bright eager light of her face. But then she flickers it down, remembers herself.

“Do you know what I mean?”

He’s prodding, he knows, unable to hold back.

“Maybe,” she says, her gaze lowered. He nods slowly, reeling himself in for now. 

His hands wrapped around his drink, he tells her: “Both. I suppose you could say it was both a self-exile and a banishment.”

She grins, her cynicism always close to the surface. “Better than being fried to death, I suppose.”

“Oh, infinitely.”

Shared humour. It's a delicious hopeful feeling.

“And now? Now you’re on some sort of rescue mission of your own?” It sounds absurd when she says it but he remembers Von and the hours of study, the hours leading up to this.

“They’re important to someone who’s important to me,” he says levelly. Beside him, Jyn thinks about it and nods.

“Yeah, I get that.” She pauses. “I’ll take you there.”

“What’s in it for you?” He doesn’t say it cruelly, more matter of fact. And she replies the same way: “Oh it should be good for some sort of bounty. Or at least intel. Certain orders in the galaxy might be interested.” She grins at him, a lethal charming mercenary.

“All right.” He smiles at her, not realising it’s the first time. And as she stares at him, mesmerised, he realises it’s going to be very, very difficult to let her go this time.

___________

 

First things first. He binds up his thigh before they find a pilot to take them to Nar Kreeta. She has weapons, tells him on the way to the shipyard that they won’t need anyone else, that they can slip in and slip out, even escorting two Ithorians out. “It’ll be fun,” she says, bright eyed, her energy infectious.

“It’s reckless,” he warns, excited despite himself.

“Oh please. Who’s the one who walked into that bar alone, knowing he was going to get attacked?”

“I was armed,” he protests. “I’m still fucking armed.”

She actually laughs at his custom blaster. 

“Rebel scum,” he mutters, grinning.

“Fuck you, old man,” she says easily, “we beat your arse.”

“No. You did.”

She falls silent then, casting him a look from under her lashes that he pretends not to see.

The journey is uneventful and the rescue depressingly easy. They get to kill a rancor though. That’s fun. His wound starts bleeding again which makes the situation much more interesting. And at one point she’s thrown back into his arms, swearing and furious, her body warm and lithe against his. She’s back into the fray in a few seconds and so is he, blaster firing and knife slashing. But he feels the imprint of her on him for the rest of the fight, all the way back to the ship where they have to comfort Von’s distressed parents and reassure them that the trip back through Hutt space will be safe.

In the crew lounge where he’s re-bandaging his thigh, she tells him she’ll be off at the next refueling stop.

“Oh right,” he says, trying for unconcerned. She watches as he ties off the bandage, his hands shaking just a little as he snips the edges neat.

They don’t speak again, and she vanishes into the shipyard as promised. His heart heavy, he returns Von’s parents to her, and returns to the small house that holds so much information he really doesn’t need anymore. He has nowhere to go, and the world is all grey again.

A few weeks later, he opens the front door to let Von out at the end of their study session, and Jyn Erso is stepping up onto the porch. Wisps of dark hair flying against her cheeks bright from the wind, she grins at him, outrageous and so damned vivid. “Hallo.”

“What -- Von, this is -- you know who this is.”

Von overcomes her shyness with so much thanks, and runs off to tell her parents.

“There’s probably going to be a whole lot of fuss now,” Krennic says wryly, closing the door when Jyn enters the house.

“Great! As long as there’s food, too. My god, you have a lot of stuff.” She rounds on him, so unselfconscious and irresistible.

“Yes, well,” he mutters, looking down.

“What do you do for money?” Jyn perches herself on the corner of his desk, all dusty from her journey. It’s an impertinent demand and she knows it.

“I barter. Why?”

She makes a face. “Well, that’s no good. How do you feel about doing a job with me?”

Krennic’s brows go up. “You want me to become a mercenary?”

“I don’t want you to become anything,” she counters patiently. “I could use a partner on this job and you could clearly use the credits, and last time went all right. So why not?”

“I could be recognised. It’s not safe.” But he’s so very tempted, for more reasons than to spend time with her, to have her back in his life.

She flicks her hand, scornful. “So what? We’ll get you some hair dye and contacts. It’ll be fine. No one’s going to expect to see the former Director of the Imperial Army where we’re going.”

So one job becomes another and then another. They work well together, quick and bloody enough to be fun. He doesn't dye his hair but grows it out, keeps it off his face with a bandana tie that she says makes him look like some pirate chef. The brown contacts work for a while until they start to irritate his eyes. By then, he’s caught enough of her recklessness that he doesn’t care to get a replacement pair. The Director of the Imperial Army is a completely different man from the mercenary who goes by the name of Fraser, vicious with a knife, somewhat inclined to torture people before he kills and robs them.

“You’re like a magpie,” she tells him when he’s looking through the latest haul of trinkets from a job.

“What’s that? Look. Look at this.” He tosses her the jewel. “Do you like that?”

Jyn examines the pendant, a teardrop the size of her thumbnail set in silver. “Yeah, I guess.”

“It’s the colour of your eyes.”

She stares at him. 

It had begun just after their first job together. He wants to tell her that there are certain soulmates for whom the entire world bursts into colour when they meet their partners. But that hasn't been them. So he had thought they were the kind for whom they are the only colour in the world. He had liked that in a way. 

Then he had seen a tree with leaves the same colour as her eyes. A painted sign. Then he knew to look for it, and when the emerald turned up, he grabbed it with slightly shaking hands. He doesn’t tell her this now. Not yet.

But maybe he doesn’t need to. 

“Oh,” she says softly, her fingertips rubbing slow over the facets. 

“It’s a bird,” she says a few moments later, reaching into the pack beside her.

“What is?”

“A magpie. It’s a bird I saw once in a menagerie.”

“Aviary.”

“Whatever.” She pulls out a boot and starts to unlace it. “Black and white, and scary as fuck. It had this really cruel beak and these terrible beady eyes.”

“Thank you very much,” he drawls, examining the stitching on a wallet he’s taken from a dead crimelord.

“No, not like that!” Jyn laughs, pulling the shoelace free. “I meant magpies like to collect shiny things. This Neimoidian girl told me.” 

He says nothing, watches from under his brows as she threads the shoelace through the loop of the pendant and ties it around her neck. The ship thrums around them, zooming through space, and they say nothing as she touches the pendant resting against the placket of her black top. Later when they’re eating, trading wild stories with the pilot, he sees the black cord still around her neck but the pendant has been tucked under her top.

It does mean something and it clearly lingers on her mind because a few jobs later, when they’re cleaning their weapons in a cantina, so much happy chaos around them, she pulls a wodge of material out of her pack and drops it in front of his knives.

“What’s this?” He raises the fabric with a blade tip, examining the pattern of white dots on grey.

“Bandanas,” she says briskly, skewering the brush down the barrel of her new pistol. “I thought you could use some more, that one’s falling apart.”

He grins, tugging the ragged thing from his head. And as he pulls a new one free and starts to fold it to the narrowness he likes, she adds: “Also, they’re the colour of your eyes. It’ll look good.”

His fingers still, the air around them heavy and somehow warm. She meets his gaze, clear. 

“What, what colour are my eyes?” His voice is scratchy in his throat.

She doesn’t blink. “Blue grey. Sometimes more blue than anything.” She pulls the brush free and squints down the barrel. “Anyway, I thought we could eat here and then go find that stupid Mandalorian. He said he had a job.”

“All right,” Krennic says, tying the bandana on. “Sounds good. How’s it look?”

Jyn casts him a brief speaking glance. “Your hair’s ridiculous.”

“Thank you,” he says nobly, making her laugh.

__________

 

The few times they need lodgings on planet, they take separate rooms. He lies in bed, looking at the wall separating them, and wonders if she can sense him on the other side. Wonders if one day, one night his room door will open and she’ll crawl into his bed, all slumbrous eyes and tender mouth, wanting him. 

The jobs don’t always go well. He gets cut and shot, nothing that can’t be dug out or healed with a bacta patch. He nearly breaks his hand once, punching a cephalopod. She yelled at him all the way to the dodgy doctor and back. He didn’t mind that so much, enjoying the fact that she worried about him. 

It’s not so much fun when she gets hurt. A Kintan crusher once sends her flying across a palace lawn, a sight that drives Krennic into a berserker rage. By the time he recovers, the creature is dead, he’s covered in its blood, severely hurt, and the other mercenaries are staring at him with more terror than respect. When he drags himself over to Jyn, she puts a hand to his ripped face and calls him a fucking idiot. She has three broken ribs, and complains bitterly through the next few jos because she refuses to take any time to heal. He does most of the shooting then, and bitches right back at her.

They never touch except in battle, and then it’s a hard hand up when one of them’s down on the ground, or shoulder to shoulder facing a line of armed guards. There are times when the battlelust roars through him, and he sees the same feral energy in her, when he knows they could grab at each other and kiss and fuck, up against the nearest wall. But that nearly always deflects into an actual fight with other people. And when it doesn’t, when he returns to the ship or his room shaking with adrenaline, he jerks off in almost near silence, biting down on the moan, biting down on the feel of her shoulder hard against his, the brush of her arm, her breath on his face as she looks past him. There are times when they’re pressed up against each other, squeezed into some tiny hidden corner, waiting for the right moment to slip past guards, and he’s sure she knows he’s hard against her. Sometimes she looks at his mouth in those moments, her eyes brilliant green, and he can almost taste her.

Then a simple robbery turns into a ridiculous life and death situation with a ticking explosive about to go off, and they’re arguing in ferocious whispers about who gets to run across the patrolled hangar to cause a diversion so the other can nab a fighter craft. “There’s no need for a fucking diversion,” Krennic’s in the middle of saying. “Just let it go off, we’ll be fine and then we can --”

“Shut up, I’m doing it,” she says, kisses him hard on the mouth, and runs out across the hangar. He can't believe what he's seeing, and then is so outraged at the sight of her opening fire on the guards that for a few seconds he’s very tempted to shoot her instead. In the foot.

But she’s right. It works. She draws the guards away from him so he gets to and into the fighter, swoops it towards her so she scrambles aboard, and the explosion happens just when they’re out of the lock. “You’re a fucking idiot,” he yells at her over the comms.

“I’m a fucking genius, and it worked,” she yells back, giddy with adrenaline in the seat behind. 

They drink a lot in a bar that night to celebrate and she laughs a lot, all up in his personal space. But he holds himself back, waiting for her even if the longing shows all over his face. When they stumble back to the shipyard, the pilot’s left without them, and that starts a whole new drama. He tells himself that if it happens, it happens and he absolutely cannot push it. It has to be her decision.

____________

 

Her decision comes not in some desperate battle or drunken pub night. They’ve landed on Coruscant, checked into one of the lower level dives. And while he’s sizing up the patrons in the adjacent bar area, she says to the Twi’lek at the desk: “One room, please.”

It’s not in the least romantic. The bed is a double, yes, but the room is tiny and dreary, one wall horribly stained with what’s probably blood. There’s a couple next door having a screaming argument in a language he doesn’t know. And the view is nothing like the gorgeous soaring skyline he knew in a former life. It’s Coruscanti slums, admittedly not as grungy as other city planets but nothing, nothing like what he would have wanted for them.

But then she shrugs her pack off and starts to unstrap her weapons, and he remembers. That was then, this is now. In that life, she would have hated him every second. In this life, she looks at the stain on the wall and says with irony: “Do you think maybe it was the room service?”

He laughs, forcing himself to relax as he takes his pack off. “If it’s anything like your cooking --”

She throws her boot in his direction. “Fuck off, like you’re any better.”

The job that night is good old-fashioned stealing of intel. The family -- human, the father a senator in the Alliance -- is hosting some dignitary. It’s an opportunity to sneak into the estate and get access to private datapads, information that will be of use against the senator. Rather than disguising themselves as server staff, they decide to scale the walls and break into the study. If they’re caught, the server excuse will be used. It’s a job she could do by herself, they both know, but she’s been promising him a chance at just this sort of caper. 

So he watches her scale the mansion wall, a lithe black figure in the shadows, and he follows her up, blood thrumming with excitement. She keeps watch at the study door as he sets to work on the safe, a combination of Old Republic materials with the latest security tech. He’s been instructed by a fellow mercenary on just how to crack it.

There’s music floating from the open doors below, a sultry night of food and wine and such civilised conversation. The house is furnished in all opulence, something he knows Jyn notices. And now from the door, she says, “How much do you think these paintings would go for?”

He doesn’t need to look up from the safe lock. “Not much, they’re fake.”

“What?” She takes a few steps into the room, staring up at them. “How can you tell?”

“I know. Right. That’s -- shit.” The safe door swings open but an alarm brrps, blue smoke issuing from the interior. “Shit, come on!” He grabs her arm, ready to run for it. 

“No, wait.”

“Don’t --”

But she’s thrust her arm through the smoke and pulled out the stack of datapads. “Here.” She shoves them at him, her smile wide and wicked.

“You’re insane,” he says with admiration, darting to the window after her. “No, fuck.” There are guards swarming the grounds, a whole contingent heading for the house. Krennic puts his hand on the jamb, datapads clutched to his chest. “Up to the roof, quick.”

“No, this way.” She’s already at the door, ducking out as he follows, swearing under his breath. There are guards clattering up the stairs, he gropes for a knife, that part of his brain clicking into murderous mode, everything narrowing and clarifying, time crystallising around her and the need to always keep her safe.

They’re running along a corridor, heading for the double balcony doors at the end, when a man steps out of what is clearly a ‘fresher door. Jyn catches him with a swift jab to the throat, topples him to the carpet, and hops over him, barely missing a beat. Krennic grins, all appreciation, as he dodges the unconscious body. She does that so well, no dramatics, just ruthless elegant efficiency. Now she tries the doors, then breaks a pane with her elbow and reaches through to unlatch them.

“Director.”

The word is stammered. Krennic’s head whips around, shocked to his core. The man is clutching the wall, getting to his feet, looked just as astounded. “Director Krennic --”

His head snaps back, the neat round hole in his forehead appearing almost as an afterthought, and his body slumps back down to the floor.

“Come on,” Jyn says, pistol in one hand, and tugs at Krennic’s arm. “Up to the roof, like you said.”

They escape the guards, escape back to the safety of the slums. Tomorrow, they’ll deliver the datapads to the Mandalorian general. For now, Krennic sits heavily on the end of the bed, staring at nothing.

“Who was he?” Jyn asks, her voice careful.

He tugs the bandana off his head and rubs a hand over his face, struggling for the words. “That’s just it.” He looks up as she approaches him. “I don’t remember his name. I think he was just some general, nobody important. No one important enough for me to remember his name.”

She sits beside him, her eyes so concerned. “Then … what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know.” He takes in a shuddering breath. “I don’t fucking know.” He stands up, agitated suddenly, needing to walk. He paces to the window and back, his blood jittering in his veins. “Maybe, maybe --”

He stops and looks at her, fierce. “But he remembered me.”

“Of course he did,” Jyn says patiently. “You were the most important person in his world.”

“Yes. And now he’s dead for it.”

She raises a brow. “As opposed to in battle? Either way, he died for his Director, didn’t he?”

Krennic laughs, as much horrified as admiring. “What happened to all your rebel idealism?”

Her smile is beautiful and brilliant in the reflected city light. “Oh, I never had that. That’s not why they wanted me.”

He sighs, suddenly so tired, somehow broken. “And why do you want me? What the hell do I have to offer anymore?”

“Shhh.” She reaches out her hand, and he takes it automatically, absently registering the fine strength of her fingers. “You have everything you always did. Your mind, your skill, all that knowledge you always had and so much more now.” She draws him closer to her, looks up into his face. “And I want you because you belong to me. You always have.”

It’s exactly the right thing to say, everything he’s wanted to hear for so long. And now he bends to her, his hand coming to her face, like everything in his entire life, every little thing has anticipated her. “I’m yours. All of me, all my heart and all my blood,” he murmurs and kisses her ripe red mouth full of danger and sweetness. 

She gasps and reaches up, clutches her hands around his neck. She kisses him back with such newness, such discovery that his head swims. And she pulls him into bed with her.

In the city light, they touch and murmur and kiss, the clothes coming apart, all the defences falling away. He shapes his hand to the swell of her naked breast, kissing her deep, kissing her so she arches into his hand, her fingers sliding up into his hair. “Don’t stop,” she tells him. He doesn’t intend to and tells her so. Her green eyes laughing up at him, she arches her back a little, pushing into his touch.

“Jyn Erso,” he murmurs, circling his fingers around the tip of her breast. “What colour are your nipples?”

She giggles, turning her face into his neck. “I don’t know. What colour?”

He tastes to see if he can tell, liking the way she grasps at his hair and moans in response. “Let’s say pink. Shall we say pink?” he teases, making her giggle again.

They play like that for a long while, exploring each other’s bodies. His nipples, his freckles. The hair between her thighs, the hair at the base of his cock. She crawls over him, a sleek fey creature in the Coruscanti night, and breathes on the hard hot shape of him. “Orson Krennic, what colour do they say your cock is?”

He laughs. “Fuck they. What do you say it is?”

She licks it long and slow from base to tip. “Oh I say red. Do you agree? Red like --”

“Red like your mouth,” he agrees, bringing her up to him so he can kiss that mouth.

“Red like your cunt,” he says breathlessly a little while later, and she lets out a catching laugh, spreading her thighs wider for his mouth, for his tongue, and then his cock. He eases into her, slow and careful, wanting this to go forever, wanting to savour every moment of watching her like this, with her dark hair spread across the white pillow, her face flushed pink with heat, and her eyes glittering green up at him. The emerald pendant lies askew below her collarbone, reflecting green. Everything beautiful in his world. 

They make love slow until it can’t be slow anymore, and then she’s fucking him back just as hard, pulling him deeper into her, as voracious as him. He drives into her, quickening til he’s pounding into her, and she’s matching him gasp for gasp, her fingers digging into his flesh, her cunt clenching tight and wet around him, clenching and clenching until she arches up against him in one long beautiful curve of breathless sound, coming for him. He presses his forehead to hers, everything blurred, and comes into her in so much heat and impossible pleasure.

“Do you see that?” she asks what seems like an age afterwards. Lying against him, they're fitted together from chest to hip and thigh, her fingertips idly stroke along the muscle of his arm. He squints, sensing something, and then opens them all the way, amazed.

“Fucken hell.”

She chuckles, pressing her mouth against the corner of his lips. “Yeah.” 

The room is full of colour, bursts of light pulsing over each other, so many vivid layers of red and green and blue and gold. The names come to him in his mother’s voice, and he says them aloud to Jyn. And of course they argue about the colours, comfortable in each other’s arms, as the fireworks explode over Coruscant and the world is made beautiful.

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt was: _Soulmate AU, the one when you see just in black and white and when you meet your soulmate you start to see colors - when Jyn and Krennic met, they didn’t get it, cause he was all in white and she all in black._
> 
> Which made me go, "Oh. Wait a minute, I know how to do that. I can do that!" And then I actually started writing it, and it was supposed to be two freaking scenes but turned into this whole damned AU which I absolutely fucking fell in love with so had to see it through to completion. I have such a weakness for mercenary AUs. 
> 
> Spot the moment I stole from Pratchett, and the bit of dialogue from **The Secret Life Of Pets**.
> 
> The name Fraser and the bandana thing is from **Black Sea** in which Mendelsohn is very Aussie and wonderfully acidic and likes to play with knives. This is what he looks like:
> 
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> 
> And the magpie thing is actually wrong, a [myth that's been disproved](https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/wild-things/magpies-don%E2%80%99t-shiny-things) so now you know.


End file.
